Outsider in the Locker Room

What the Stories We Tell Ourselves About High Expectations Leave Out

By William A. Proefriedt

In the current education reform movement, we try again to make bricks without straw. We pretend that schools and their students exist within a social and economic vacuum. The standards reformers do not simply neglect socioeconomic forces in formulating their policies; they argue that those who appeal to such forces make excuses for poor students and thereby do them harm. They have devised a marvelously effective rhetoric denouncing “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and repeating the mantra of “no excuses.”

The central component of the standards approach is the insistence on high expectations for students and for those who work in the schools. Set the expectations, hold students and school people accountable with periodic testing, and you will bring out their best efforts. As everyone works up to high standards, individuals ensure their economic success, and the nation survives and prospers in the world marketplace. A time frame is set up with the necessity of improved scores each year among all categories of students. The centerpiece of the controversial No Child Left Behind Act is that subgroups—African-American, Asian, Latino, Native-American, white, limited-English-proficient, low-income, and students with disabilities—must show the same progress as all other students for a school to be listed as making adequate yearly progress. A district that shows 40 percent of its students as proficient on standardized tests this year will keep improving by regular intervals each year until, in 2014, 100 percent—every last one of its students—will demonstrate proficiency. All of this is to be accomplished solely through attention to individuals and schools.

How do we account for this self-deception and illusory thinking? Firstly, we fool ourselves with careless language. America’s public schools, we hear, ought to provide equal educational opportunity to all, will provide it, or do provide it. Educational rhetoric often skips merrily over some important distinctions. Audiences, for their own reasons, do not listen carefully and are left with the sense that all is well, that equality of educational opportunity has been achieved. While we acknowledge the differences in expenditures among school districts, we resist dramatic change. We don’t take seriously the impact of parental economic status on student test scores. We pretend it doesn’t matter that there are dramatic differences in income and wealth in the society from which the students have come and into which...